Where do you see yourself in ten years? (7)
Our story breaks free of the pedestrian constraints of the merely improbable, fantastical and nonsensical, and dares to portray the truly incomprehensible: an academic who is a normal human being.
[Previously: Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6.]
My plan to wield Alexander's celebrity and genius as the unbeatable weapon to finally secure my place in the department’s top spot was crumbling before me, now that Alexander had turned into a dim-witted boob.
“So he's reduced to a simpleton?” I asked the doctor.
“Oh no. He seems as sharp as ever. Just... normal.”
This made no sense to me. Weren't “normal” and “simpleton” synonymous?
I pushed past the doctor and into Alexander's room. He was sitting up in bed, and as soon as he saw me he smiled. It was a wide, freakish smile. I had never seen anything like it before. It made me feel strange. I mean — when someone smiles, that's a sign to be on your guard. But instead it made me feel... good? This was some freaky shit indeed.
“Hello!” he gushed at me. “So you're the man who brought me back to life?”
I didn't know what to say. This must be a trap. But I couldn't see how it worked.
He reached forward and warmly shook my hand. “There are so many people I need to thank. The doctors, the ambulance driver, all of your research team, but really I think I need to thank you most of all!”
Something terrible was happening to me. What sly trick was he pulling? I was feeling warm and good all over. It was utterly terrifying.
He held up an object that had been beside him on the bed. It was a phone. “I believe this belongs to your student. The battery went flat in the ambulance. He left it to track my progress.”
“Um.” How was he able to make an accusation that sounded like gratitude? “I can give it back to him.”
Alexander swung himself out of the bed and stood up. “No, no! I will return it to him personally. It was extremely kind of him to risk losing it, just to make sure I got to the hospital safely.”
Was this guy for real? How could he deliver such a bitingly sarcastic line as if he meant it sincerely?
I followed him out of the hospital room. He had told the doctors that he would catch a bus back to the university, which they obviously found hilarious, but instead of rounding up all of their colleagues so that they could all watch what happened when he stepped outside and discovered that he was in the middle of a bombed-out war zone, the doctor was so charmed by Alexander's simple honesty that he instead offered him his own bicycle to ride back to the physics department.
“A bicycle? Oh, that's wonderful! The world has become so environmentally friendly while I was asleep!”
“Um, no,” said the doctor. “Could you sit down for a moment?”
The doctor quietly explained to Alexander what had happened over the last eight years.
“Oh, but that's awful! What a horrendous time you have all been through. And my old research team...”
The doctor looked to me. I had no idea what happened to all those people.
I shrugged. “Probably dead.”
The doctor gave me a withering look, and I guess if you thought about it in the right way, that was a bit insensitive of me. Brady was not angry at me, though. His look appeared to be one of complete sympathy.
“You have all been horribly brutalised,” he said. “The tragedy was so bad that you are now numb to all feeling.”
What a nice way of putting it! At first I thought he was going to be insufferable, but I was beginning to like him. Maybe he could be even more useful than I had originally thought? If he was just as clever as ever, but also able to disarm people with this voodoo kindness of his, then he could be a powerful ally indeed!
He was also going to be a lot of work. While we cycled back to the department, he suffered a wild succession of crises over the state of the world. His country had been devastated by war, his town was in ruins around him, and, for reasons I neglected to explain, countless passers-by yelled his name and shook their fists at us. It was a hair-raising journey. At the same time as I had to avoid craters and rubble and irate pedestrians, I also had to wrack my brains to come up with reasons to convince him not to rush off to join the Resistance, or to effectively commit suicide by lying down in front of enemy tanks, or kick-start a self-sustaining community of vegan pacifists on the Arran Islands.
He was simply unequipped to face modern reality. He was from a simpler, happier time. As far I could tell, the worst thing he'd ever had to deal with was when everyone caught a bad cold in 2020. Now we couldn't turn a corner without him having to stop for five minutes to sob and to desperately concoct new ways to try to fix this broken world.
By the time we reached the physics building I had — I think — convinced him that the most principled thing he could do was to continue to pursue pure scientific research.
When we arrived I was eager to see if my hunch that he could be helpful would pay off. Prof Farmer, still officially the current Head of Department, was at the door to meet him. The slimy bastard was at his most obsequious. He took Alexander by the hand and lead him on a tour of the remains of his old department, comforting him all the way, and finishing of course in Farmer's own lab.
I trailed behind, terrified that I had screwed up. By now Alexander was an emotional wreck. Tears streamed down his face. The steep decline and deterioration of this once-mediocre institution was the most painful blow yet. His only comfort was Farmer, with his arm around Alexander's shoulders. The sneaky worm was going to turn Alexander to his own cause.
But once we were inside Farmer's lab, I discovered that maybe everything was going to be Ok. Alexander walked past each of the lab benches and peered at the apparatus.
“What is all this for?” he asked.
“These are my experiments,” said Farmer, swelling with pride. “Each one is producing ever more refined measurements of the constants of Nature. It is extremely important work.”
Alexander turned and stared at him, as if, of all the ghastly things he had seen today, this was without doubt the worst. “But,” he said, “These are all just experiments from a first-year lab course.”
My heart sang.
Could it be true?
What a beautiful revelation!
A mere eight years of mass emigration, mass redundancy, and mass staff turnover (our little euphemism for war casualties) had gutted our intellectual culture. We easily forgot that some of our most senior professors had been originally hired from the pool of undergraduates whose exam marks were too low for them to enter the army.
Perhaps it shouldn’t have been a surprise that all of Farmer's groundbreaking, state-of-the-art, precision probes of the most fundamental properties of the universe — they were just warm-up exercises for undergraduates!
Farmer was shrinking before my eyes. He knew he was beaten.
The best thing of all was that Alexander was entirely without guile or malice. He was purely innocent. He was just trying to make sense of what was going on.
“I don't understand,” he said. “Isn't that what they are?”
I magnanimously swung in to rescue Farmer from his own failure. “Yes, of course,” I said, taking Alexander by the arm and leading him away. “Maybe we weren't clear. Of course these are the first-year experiments. Let's go now to my lab.”
He brightened up. “Oh yes! I'd love to see what you've been working on.”
Perfect! Now we could go and look at my lab and—
Oh shit.
It wasn’t as if I had made the apparently trivial observation that Farmer had spent the last five years mistaking introductory physics experiments for profound research. How certain could I be that I was doing any better?
As I scrambled to think of something else to show him, it dawned on me that Alexander was not my ally after all. He was in fact the biggest threat I had ever faced.
Can our beleaguered protagonist ever finally win? Or is he doomed to suffer a never-ending sequence of humiliating failures? Find out in the next and final episode!